WestWave Dance Festival in S.F. at 20

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Jenna McClintock and Brandon "Private" Freeman perform a new work by choreographer Amy Seiwert for the WestWave Dance Festival.

Jenna McClintock and Brandon "Private" Freeman perform a new work by choreographer Amy Seiwert for the WestWave Dance Festival.

Photo: David DeSilva

Photo: David DeSilva

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Jenna McClintock and Brandon "Private" Freeman perform a new work by choreographer Amy Seiwert for the WestWave Dance Festival.

Jenna McClintock and Brandon "Private" Freeman perform a new work by choreographer Amy Seiwert for the WestWave Dance Festival.

Photo: David DeSilva

WestWave Dance Festival in S.F. at 20

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The Bay Area boasts the second-most active dance community in the country. So, it has always been a mystery why, in the summer months, so many of those gifted dancers and choreographers steal away for parts unknown, leaving dance audiences parched for satisfaction during July and August.

That gap in our dance calendar is not new. The absence of summertime fare struck Joan Lazarus 17 years ago, when she joined Cathleen McCarthy in jointly producing the young WestWave Dance Festival. Projects like this don't traditionally survive in the perennially risky economic climate.

"We all bought the rumor that there was no dance audience in the summer," confessed Lazarus in a phone chat. But this dance teacher and former staffer at the San Francisco Ballet, persisted. As sole executive director of WestWave, she has experimented with programming formulas and last year even risked a Monday-evening fall series, which proved astonishingly successful.

Now in its 20th anniversary season, the WestWave statistics speak for themselves. Over the past two decades, the festival has hosted 523 choreographers, 393 world premieres and 2,092 performances.

Lazarus will significantly add to that tally this summer. Tuesday's fundraising gala will preface a series of seven concerts of (mostly new) contemporary choreography, which will spread into October in two theaters. Lazarus' programming scheme is a hybrid of curated fare (40 percent in 2011) and artists introduced through open auditions. In fact, she had never previously heard of some of this year's winning applicants and seems to delight in her good luck.

"I just love technology," she says. "They used to send me VHS tapes. Now, they send me a link and I watch online. You really discover people that way."

The WestWave financial arrangement works like this: Lazarus defrays rehearsal and production costs but does not provide a fee to the artists. Box-office surplus, if any, is shared with the artists.

Lazarus does not deny that she plays favorites.

"I invited some people because I like them," she says, "and I knew what they were up to."

"Here's one advantage of a summer festival," Lazarus says. "This is the time of year that suits Amy and her friends because they're all off contract with their own companies and they have time to do more risk-taking experimental dances with people they wouldn't ordinarily get a chance to work with."

The greatest misconception about WestWave is that it is an exclusively Bay Area affair. Lazarus will book the talent where she finds and likes it. This summer's out-of-towners include Andrew Skeels, who dances with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal and has made a piece for members of Ballet Colorado and Yolanda Yorke, a former member of Bella Lewitzky's Los Angeles company.

Experience with WestWave suggests that a Lazarus-curated evening often brims with surprises, even, occasionally, revelations. It's not so easy to pin down Lazarus about her taste in choreography. You suggest that, perhaps, she leans to ballet.

"I don't know if I'm classically oriented," Lazarus responds in a kind of informal manifesto, "but I'm very interested in exceptional dancing. I want to see people who are trained. Virtuosity in a dancer is something that excites me no end. Now, virtuosity sometimes means leaving it alone and letting it look natural. I want to see people who have studied dance for more than six weeks, people who are using dance as an expressive and communicative tool, or as a filter for how they see the world. That all takes craft."

If you intimate that Lazarus' scheme for this 20th anniversary WestWave is, perhaps, a bit grandiose, she laughs off the suggestion.

"If I'm going to go over the top, I'll go over all the way," she says. "I haven't had so much fun in years." {sbox}